Hasselblad University

On Tuesday October 7th, I participated in the first official Hasselblad University, which is a pompous name for a workshop, held at Splashlight Studios in Miami. The purpose of this workshop was to introduce and train photographers and techs on the new Hasselblad cameras (H3DII-31/39/50) and most importantly their new capturing and raw processing software called Phocus. The cameras I have to say need no further introduction considering their established reputation. Their new dedicated digital backs on the other hand come to take a share in the market if not a whole bunch of other brand's shares. Communication between camera and back is no issue and microscopic matching between them make focal planes of lens and digital sensor extremely precise. The Phocus software, even though uses the same processing engine as FlexColor, Hasselblad's previous version of capture and raw processing software, has a completely new interface, much like Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom with several adaptations for it's capture capabilities. After going over the program's features and a bit of testing, it seems easy to use, specially if you are familiar with Lightroom. There is still a lot of room for improvement in the software, which as of now is on version 1.1. Hopefully by version 2.0 the majority of the requests and issues will be resolved and that, in my humble opinion will make the Hasselblad "package" a force to reckon in the digital medium format war.

Thanks to John Williams (Hasselblad Atlanta) and Greg Hollmann (Hasselblad New York) for coming down to Miami and putting this together.

For more information on Hasselblad cameras and Phocus go to:

Hasselblad USA